I agree. On top of that, in true Google style, basic things just don't work.

Any time I upload an attachment, it just fails with something vague like "couldn't process file". Whether that's a simple .MD or .txt with less than 100 lines or a PDF. I tried making a gem today. It just wouldn't let me save it, with some vague error too.

I also tried having it read and write stuff to "my stuff" and Google drive. But it would consistently write but not be able to read from it again. Or would read one file from Google drive and ignore everything else.

Their models are seriously impressive. But as usual Google sucks at making them work well in real products.

It's so capable at some things, and others are garbage. I uploaded a photo of some words for a spelling bee and asked it to quiz my kid on the words. The first word it asked, wasn't on the list. After multiple attempts to get it to start asking only the words in the uploaded pic, it did, and then would get the spellings wrong in the Q&A. I gave up.

How can the models be impressive if they switch to Chinese mid-sentence? I've observed those bizarre bugs too. Even GPT-3 didn't have those. Maybe GPT-2 did. It's actually impressive that they managed to botch it so badly.

Google is great at some things, but this isn't it.

Agreed on the product. I can't make Gemini read my emails on GMail. One day it says it doesn't have access, the other day it says Query unsuccessful. Claude Desktop has no problem reaching to GMail, on the other hand :)

Sadly true.

It is also one of the worst models to have a sort of ongoing conversation with.

Their models are absolutely not impressive.

Not a single person is using it for coding (outside of Google itself).

Maybe some people on a very generous free plan.

Their model is a fine mid 2025 model, backed by enormous compute resources and an army of GDM engineers to help the “researchers” keep the model on task as it traverses the “tree of thoughts”.

But that isn’t “the model” that’s an old model backed by massive money.